Meet Manager:Database Connections

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(Enterprise Edition only)

Instead of opening an .mdb file you can open a .ini file with a description of a connection to any common database. But there are some differences compared to MS Access files:

  • Meet databases have to be created manually
  • Backup / restore only works with concurrent backups

The main advantage is, that you can run Meet Manager in a network on a real database server. The following documentation expects, that you are familiar with the installation of a database server, user setup and basic managment tasks like creating an empty database.

The first time you connect to a database with Meet Manager, the application will automatically create the necessary tables and indices. You should always use an empty database in order to avoid conflicts with table names. Once a database is initialized with Meet Manager, you can backup and restore it with your database in order to use it for a different meet.

The .ini file

The .ini file needs the following sections:

[Database]

In this section you can define the following keys:

  • DatabaseType: Values are FIREBIRD, MSSQL, MYSQL, ORACLE and POSTGRESQL.
  • Server: The name or IP address of your database server
  • Database: The name of your database
  • Username: The username used to connect to the database
  • Password: The password for the database user


Supported databases

Firebird

http://www.firebirdsql.org is a good page to start with Firebird. We recommend to use the latest version of Firebird (3.0). Databases should always be created with UTF8 as default characterset. In addition to the regular keys you have to define the following values in the .ini file:

  • Charset=UTF8
  • ClientLibrary=fbclient.dll

When you define the "Database" key, the database name is either the full local path on the database server or the name of an alias, defined in the aliases.conf file of Firebird. We recommend always to use the aliases.conf file. The server name part can either be an IP address or any valid name for a host, that can be resolved by the DNS on the client computers. For local installations use "localhost".

MS Sql Server

My SQL

Oracle

PostgreSQL